of his life up
to that time were for his country like the prophet's scroll, inscribed with
lamentation and mourning and woe. And in his words to the bishop of Sirmium
he gives a faithful picture of the position which his successors held until
the time when at length they invoked the king of the Franks to come to the
succour of St. Peter.

The calamities which fell upon Italy, and especially upon Rome, in the five
captures of the Gothic war, in the subsequent descent of the Lombards, in
the subjection of the old capital to a distant and despotic lord, were so
great that eye-witnesses declare no language could express them. That they
were to the Popes themselves unspeakably distressing, that the Popes did
all in their power to avert them, the letters of the Popes remain to
testify. I must now dwell for a time on the singular result which they had
upon the Roman Primacy. When temporal calamities less than these fell upon
the cities of Alexandria and Antioch, the seats of the other two original
Petrine patriarchates, the authority of their prelates sunk almost to
nothing. Before these calamities they had yielded up a large portion of
their dignity and autonomy to the overreaching see of the eastern capital,
the rank of which, above that of a simple bishopric, rested on nothing but
the emperor's will to concentrate spiritual power in his own hands, by
making its seat for the whole eastern empire the city of the Bosporus. But
when Rome was ruined in the Gothic war nothing of the kind took place. St.
Gregory inherited his place as successor of St. Peter without the least
impairment of the authority which his see had held from the beginning. One
wound, indeed, had been inflicted upon it by the Herule Odoacer, when in
occupation of the sovereign power which he held over Italy, in name, by
delegation of the emperor Zeno, in fact, as head of the foreign
mercenaries, he had claimed a right to confirm the election of the Pope
when chosen. Theodorick and Theodatus had continued to exert that
right--and from the Goths Justinian had taken it--and Gregory himself, as
we have seen, had applied to the imperial power at Constantinople to
frustrate his own election by clergy and people. But the Pope, when once
recognised, entered upon his full and undiminished authority. All that St.
Leo had been St. Gregory was, though Rome had been almost destroyed, and
was in the temporal rule subject to the emperor's officer, the exarch at
Ravenna. I do